MARRIED TO MY SEXY RUTHLESS ENEMY

Miss Quinn, if you want this job... I suggest you bend over that table and let me have a taste." The words slithered out of the manager's mouth like poison.

He leaned back in his leather chair, a greasy smirk plastered across his face, his beady eyes crawling over my body like I was a piece of meat laid out for auction.

I froze. "E-Excuse me?" I stammered, my grip tightening on my portfolio until my knuckles turned white.

"You heard me." He stood up, adjusting the cheap silk tie straining around his thick neck.

He was a fat, balding man in his fifties, and the naked hunger in his eyes made my stomach violently churn.

"I've seen your resume. Impressive. But I don't hire based on paper, sweetheart. I hire based on... loyalty.

And I need to know how loyal you can be." He took a step toward me, the stench of his cheap cologne invading my space.

I took a step back, my heels hitting the edge of a filing cabinet. "I have ten years of experience," I said, my voice shaking with barely contained rage.

"I am highly qualified for this position. I don't need to" "You don't need to do anything," he interrupted, his smirk widening into a predatory grin.

"But you want this job, don't you? I saw your file. Single mother. Drowning in debt. Desperate." He let the word hang in the air like a guillotine blade.

"Desperate women do desperate things." My hands clenched into fists at my sides. My vision blurred with a red-hot fury.

This is the third interview this week, a voice whispered in my head. You have no money. Your mother needs her medication.

You can't afford to walk out. But my legs were already moving. I grabbed my purse from the chair, my revulsion overpowering my desperation.

"I'd rather scrub toilets than work for a pig like you," I spat, my voice dripping with venom. The manager's face twisted into an ugly sneer.

"You'll regret this, you little—" DING. DING. DING. My phone screamed from inside my purse.

I yanked it out, grateful for any distraction that would get me out of this office. "Hello?" "Miss Quinn?" The voice on the other end was frantic, breathless.

"This is Nurse Hana from Unity Hospital. Your mother... there's been an accident. You need to come immediately."

The world stopped spinning. "What?" My voice came out as a broken whisper. "What accident? Is she okay?" "She's in critical condition. Broken ribs. Fractured legs. Severe internal bleeding.

We need you to sign consent forms for emergency surgery. Please, come quickly."

The phone slipped from my trembling fingers and clattered to the floor. "Miss Quinn?" the manager said, his sleazy smirk returning.

"Everything alright? If you need some comfort—" I didn't answer. I was already running. I don't remember how I got to the hospital.

I don't remember the frantic cab ride, or the sprint through the emergency room doors.

All I remember is the sound of my own heartbeat thundering in my ears, a deafening drum of pure terror as I burst into the last ward.

"Mom..." She was barely recognizable. My mother, my strong, beautiful, resilient mother, lay on a gurney, her face a mask of purple bruises, her legs twisted at unnatural, horrifying angles.

Tubes and wires snaked out of her body, and the machines beeped in a terrifying, mechanical rhythm. "Miss Quinn," a doctor said, appearing beside me with a clipboard.

"We need your signature. We have to operate immediately, or she won't survive the night." I grabbed the pen, my hands shaking so badly I could barely write my name.

"Please," I whispered, tears streaming down my face, blurring my vision. "Please save her." The doctor hesitated. His eyes darted nervously to the side, as if he was afraid to speak.

"We will do everything we can," he said carefully, his voice dropping to a hush. "But... there's a problem."

"What problem?" I choked out. "Her injuries... they weren't from a simple accident. Someone did this to her. And whoever it was... they've made it very clear that no hospital should treat her."

My blood ran cold. "What are you saying?" "I'm saying," the doctor leaned in, his face pale with fear, "that no surgeon in this hospital will touch her.

They're too afraid. The person behind this... they're too powerful. I'm sorry.

We can't help you." He handed me back the clipboard and walked away, leaving me alone in the corridor with my unconscious mother and the crushing weight of reality.

I sank to my knees, the cold linoleum biting into my skin. I don't know how long I sat there, sobbing on the cold hospital floor.

Minutes? Hours? The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting a sickly, pale glow on the sterile white walls.

Every time a doctor or a nurse walked past, I reached out, grabbing at their scrubs, begging them to help.

They wouldn't even look me in the eye. They just pulled their arms away and hurried down the hall, leaving me with nothing but the agonizing sound of my mother's heart monitor beeping.

I had no money. No connections. No power. I had spent my whole life running from the kind of people who could do this.

I had tried so hard to build a quiet, normal existence, to keep my mother safe from the shadows of my past.

But they had found me. And they had hurt the one person I loved to get to me. I looked through the glass door at my mother's broken body.

She was all I had. If she died... I would have nothing left. I couldn't let her die. I couldn't. But I knew the kind of power it took to blacklist an entire hospital.

I knew that no amount of begging or pleading would save her now.

There was only one person in this city—in this country, who had the power to defy them. A man I had sworn I would never speak to again.

A man I hated with every fiber of my being. A man who had made my childhood a living hell. A man who could save my mother... for a price.

I pulled out my phone. My fingers hovered over his name in my contacts.

My hands were shaking so violently I almost dropped the device. Damon Devere.

The Devil Himself. I pressed call.

The phone call lasted less than a minute, but it felt like a lifetime.

"Come to my estate. Now." "No, Damon. My mother is in the hospital. I need to be here—"

"I'm a busy man, Liana. I don't tolerate delays." His voice was cold, clipped, and utterly without sympathy. "You have thirty minutes.

If you're not in my study by eleven o'clock sharp, our deal is off. And your mother dies." The line went dead.

I pulled the phone from my ear and stared at it, my entire body trembling with a mixture of rage and helpless terror.

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to throw the phone across the room. But I knew, with sickening certainty, that Damon Devere was not a man who bluffed.

If I